So you want your visitors to have the option to enlarge a certain picture that you have on your website?  Creating a lightbox is super easy and can create a long lasting effect that will heighten user experience and can help generate sales.

 

Step 1- figure out which of your photos you would like to experiment and learn this process with.  This can be within an individual page or within the snippet zones.  You can also upload an image into the spot where you want it to go now.

 

 

Step 2-Highlight your image (This means just click on it so that those boxes appear around the edges) and then right click.   Here you will want to do a couple of things.

 

 

A-Set your Image Alignment so that the words are aligned to the left.

B- Set your image margins so there is a little space between the Right and Bottom of the picture.  (I prefer Right=5 and depending on the look of the page; Bottom=3)

 

 

 

C- Copy your Image Source.  Make sure you grab  all of the information from the box: Image Src.

 

 

 

 

 

Step 3- Double check that your image still has the sizing boxes around the edges.  Click on the Hyperlink Manager button and paste your Image Src information into the url box.

 

 

Step 4- Switch your WYSIWYG editor into html view and find the very first part of  your code.  It should look something like this:

<a href=”/Websites/6/674/Website/Files/capsign.jpg”XXXX ><img style=”float: left;

We want to put:    rel=”lightbox”       in place of the XXXX

So you will end up with code that looks like this:

<a href=”/Websites/6/674/Website/Files/capsign.jpg” rel=”lightbox”><img style=”float: left…

 

 

 

 

Now,  if you are new- try not to get frustrated!  There are several steps here and even though they can seem intimidating, everything is quite simple and you aren’t going to hurt anything!  With all of that being said, any issues that do arise can be handled exceptionally well from our wonderful support team!

 

 

 

 

Just added a new feature that will automatically ping the Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask search engines with your sitemap.xml file each time you publish your website.

This will help get your sites indexed faster by notifying the search engines every time you publish a new site, or add new pages to your sites.

If you want to view your website sitemap, you can navigate using your browser to the URL…

http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Just replace with your domain and you will see the XML file that the search engines will use to crawl your site.

Any sites that have already been published before 5/26/2011 will need to be republished to take advantage of this feature.  If your sites are already indexed, then this wont be as big a concern for you.

The way to check to see if your site has been indexed by Google is to do a Google search using the following…

site:www.yourdomain.com

Screenshot:

And then you should see a list of all the pages on your site that Google has in their index.  If your site is not yet indexed, then try to republish and wait a few days to check again.

If after 5 days your site is still not indexed, then we recommend you do either order some of our outsourced SEO services, or start building some links manually to your site.

Best,

John Schroeder